Hell, in the wake of the Patriot Act, what with privacy violations, National Security Letters, legalized torture of foreign nationals... the Inquisition is already here.
Oh... they get the point all right. The problem is that these people are far more concerned about their public image than the quality of education afforded the students at their fine institution. And that problem is very widespread and has to do with our educators being more politician than educator.
A large corporation can become so topheavy with middle management (synonymous with "administration" in educational parlance) that it fails to maintain sufficient productivity and goes out of business. Or maybe it will go through bankruptcy, reorganize, and come out of it a leaner, meaner organization. Schools, on the other hand, have no intrinsic negative feedback mechanism to provide a penalty for poor judgment. Rather, if their little empire isn't big enough to suit them, they complain bitterly about being "underfunded", demand additional tax money to "improve the educational experience of our children" and then go hire some more administrators.
Really, it's not hard to figure out why the American public education system is in such a shambles.
On a more serious note: how is it that a couple of mods find my post insightful, others disagree and mod it overrated, and I get modded down past the starting point? It's not like it was troll or flamebait.
I'm sure it has more to do with the widespread use of recreational drugs than anything you actually said.
Well, the development of religion can be considered an early attempt to make some kind of sense out of a largely unpredictable, hostile world. In that context, mostly-rational behavior on the part of God (or Gods) is a prequisite for acceptability, since it's the reason for His (or Their) existence.
What I find ironic is how closed minded "objective people of science" can be.
It's all relative. If you were actually honest with yourself you'd recognize that "close minded" applies more to religious fundamentalism than it does to "objective people of science." The reason that such people appear "close minded" to fundamentalists is that fundamentalists (the more vocal of them, at least) often lack understanding of science (or basic reasoning ability for that matter.) From a scientific point of view, they are spewing unadulterated pure drivel, and there really is no sensible response other than to be "close minded." For example, suppose I came to you and said, "Four billion years ago an alien spacecraft landed on Earth and ejected its garbage, and the microbes in it grew and flourished and evolved into people and stuff, and I have this book right here that proves it!" You'd write me off immediately as a complete whacko, regardless of how sincere I might appear or how deeply I believed what I was telling you. But... when you get right down to it, simple belief just isn't enough. A scientist who takes things on faith isn't. A scientist, that is.
Just because an event described in the Bible cannot be explained by our current understanding of the universe does not mean it should be excluded from being a possibility.
Yes, it does... to the extent that such events cannot be experimentally verified. Refresh your knowledge of how science functions: all things are considered possible, but not all things can be scientifically evaluated. Those that cannot are of no value to orthodox science. Until our understanding of the Universe-at-large advances to the point where those Biblical events can be properly evaluated it will remain so. And that, my friend, is the way it should be, since there is no known scientific technique for evaluating spiritual matters. Conversely, of course, spirituality makes a poor yardstick for understanding science, the scientific method, and the true nature of reality. That is the difference between Truth, as espoused by the Bible, and knowledge as accumulated by scientific research.
Frankly, I am disturbed by these ongoing attempts to corrupt and devalue science in order to proselytize. After thousands of years of stumbling around in the dark, Mankind finally figured out how to reliably distinguish what is, from what we might wish it to be. We never managed to unlock true power on any meaningful scale until science happened. You should be grateful for that, really, you should. Better yet, recognize that diluting science with religion is a fundamentally stupid mistake that will cost us dearly.
Anyone that feels threatened by greater understanding of Nature (God's creation, if you wish) should truly re-evaluate his or her own motives. They aren't pure, and are themselves deserving of greater scrutiny.
For those Star Trek fans wondering what to ask for this Christmas, you may wish to consider The Ultimate Star Trek Collection to be released on November 15. For just (cough) $2499.99
The ability to do these things is probably the strength of China. Because the economy is run by the government, it has the ability to pursue these large-scale and exciting projects such as sending a man to the moon or creating ecological cities.
You're right... the United States would never be able to put a man on the Moon. Only totalitarian states like Russia and China can do things like that. And I'm still waiting for those nations to come up with an exciting, large-scale global networking system so that we can all communicate freely with each other.
The reality is that central planning doesn't work if you want to have an efficient, progressive economy that is responsive to the needs of the people. China's government wants the benefits of industrialization, and they want them badly. The problem is finding a balance between a free market and their traditional heavy-handed autocratic control. Put it this way: advanced large-scale industrialization and the requisite foreign investment are unlikely companions to totalitarianism. It remains to be seen if they can pull it off, long term, without their form of government undergoing some significant changes. To a degree, it depends upon how successful they are at providing economic benefits to their people. It's really, really hard to get someone to willingly go back to a rice paddy when they've had a taste of a better life. My own feeling is that China's government has opened a can of worms, big ones, and that they may find it impossible to recan them.
The advantage the Soviet Union had over the United States in terms of space exploration (a terribly expensive proposition) was the ability to maintain a particular effort over the long haul. In the United States, our space development programs are at the whim of the current Congress and Administration, making it difficult to achieve anything that requires sustained investment. So yes, in that respect China will have a similar advantage as long as its leaders are able to maintain their focus.
People that survive being in a fire often need treatment for smoke inhalation, but are released from the hospital after a short stay. People that smoke cigarettes may also require treatment for smoke inhalation, involving surgery, radiation and chemotherapy treatments, the loss of all body hair, and premature death.
Phooey on you. You might as well say that the Statue of Liberty has no meaning to us because the French designed and built it. As it happens, that particular construct was a powerful symbol of the respect that both nations maintained for each other, once upon a time (the American Revolution wouldn't have been successful without France's backing.) The original poster was correct: the attack was an attempt to demoralize us, and the Towers were chosen for their symbolic value. The fact that a Japanese architect designed them is... well, meaningless in that context and I don't know why you brought it up, particularly since Japan is one of our allies.
Of course, we're all assuming that the Universe as we know it is a closed system. Perhaps it's not... maybe some Intelligent Designer recharges the batteries now and then. Okay, I'll lay off the crack pipe for now.
There have been a number of books written about surviving the Big Bang. James Blish's Cities in Flight series ends with the protagonists competing with an evil Empire for the right to determine the course of the next cycle. Another excellent work is Poul Anderson's "Tau Zero", in which Earth's first ramscoop starship makes it past the Big Bang and establishes a civilization in the now-expanding Universe.
Frankly, I believe that if more countries made securing titty a national priority the world would be a happier place.
But the reality is this: whatever new technology for power production is introduced (unless it is so cheap and simple that it can be built in a garage and runs off tap water) will be owned (lock, stock and barrel), by the energy incumbents. They will spend any amount of money, buy all the laws (and lawmakers) necessary, in order to make sure it goes down that way. That means that as petroleum consumption drops due to increasing utilization of new power technology, the price per unit volume of petroleum products will be raised proportionately to maintain their profit stream. And when the last drop of petroleum is squeezed from the earth, their stockholders won't even notice.
Maybe it might have been different fifty or a hundred years ago, but given that corporatism is the rule of the day (and, more and more, the rule of Law) I can't see it happening any other way. Get used to paying BP Fusion and Citglow for your deuterium capsules. Certainly something will have to be discovered or invented before petroleum disappears completely, or civilization will disappear shortly thereafter.
Of course, when you get right down to it, petroleum is far, far too valuable a resource to be simply burned for power. We really need another power source capable of running a high-technology industrial civilization on a global scale. And whatever it is... it will have to be big.
And I certainly have no interest in pleasing Jeremy Rifkin or anyone like him. I thought once of buying him a pair of wooden clogs, like the ones a certain group of people used to throw into factory
machinery.
It doesn't seem occur to people like this that an unlimited power source would open up the entire solar system for exploitation. Regardless, countries like China and India are "using up even more of the planet even faster" without such an energy source, so in the long run we'd be better off having it.
Maybe... however that doesn't mean that the Universe isn't cyclic. For all we know, there have been trillions of Big Bangs, with an infinite number yet to go.
If by "Web" the submitter means "World Wide Web" and if by "not be invented" he means "uninvented" then yes, it's entirely possible that the rest of the world will screw things up to the point that the Web will be effectively uninvented.
Besides, he got his Yoda-speak wrong, the title should have been "Invented not the Web could today be"
Slashdot Mirror
+5 if I had 'em.
... some would argue that economics is fingerpainting.
Although
Kansas Board of Ed. Adopts Intelligent Design
... the Inquisition is already here.
The New Dark Age is almost upon us.
Hell, in the wake of the Patriot Act, what with privacy violations, National Security Letters, legalized torture of foreign nationals
I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Orion slave-girl fetish, eh?
Me too.
Oh ... they get the point all right. The problem is that these people are far more concerned about their public image than the quality of education afforded the students at their fine institution. And that problem is very widespread and has to do with our educators being more politician than educator.
A large corporation can become so topheavy with middle management (synonymous with "administration" in educational parlance) that it fails to maintain sufficient productivity and goes out of business. Or maybe it will go through bankruptcy, reorganize, and come out of it a leaner, meaner organization. Schools, on the other hand, have no intrinsic negative feedback mechanism to provide a penalty for poor judgment. Rather, if their little empire isn't big enough to suit them, they complain bitterly about being "underfunded", demand additional tax money to "improve the educational experience of our children" and then go hire some more administrators.
Really, it's not hard to figure out why the American public education system is in such a shambles.
On a more serious note: how is it that a couple of mods find my post insightful, others disagree and mod it overrated, and I get modded down past the starting point? It's not like it was troll or flamebait.
I'm sure it has more to do with the widespread use of recreational drugs than anything you actually said.
Well, the development of religion can be considered an early attempt to make some kind of sense out of a largely unpredictable, hostile world. In that context, mostly-rational behavior on the part of God (or Gods) is a prequisite for acceptability, since it's the reason for His (or Their) existence.
What I find ironic is how closed minded "objective people of science" can be.
... when you get right down to it, simple belief just isn't enough. A scientist who takes things on faith isn't. A scientist, that is.
... to the extent that such events cannot be experimentally verified. Refresh your knowledge of how science functions: all things are considered possible, but not all things can be scientifically evaluated. Those that cannot are of no value to orthodox science. Until our understanding of the Universe-at-large advances to the point where those Biblical events can be properly evaluated it will remain so. And that, my friend, is the way it should be, since there is no known scientific technique for evaluating spiritual matters. Conversely, of course, spirituality makes a poor yardstick for understanding science, the scientific method, and the true nature of reality. That is the difference between Truth, as espoused by the Bible, and knowledge as accumulated by scientific research.
It's all relative. If you were actually honest with yourself you'd recognize that "close minded" applies more to religious fundamentalism than it does to "objective people of science." The reason that such people appear "close minded" to fundamentalists is that fundamentalists (the more vocal of them, at least) often lack understanding of science (or basic reasoning ability for that matter.) From a scientific point of view, they are spewing unadulterated pure drivel, and there really is no sensible response other than to be "close minded." For example, suppose I came to you and said, "Four billion years ago an alien spacecraft landed on Earth and ejected its garbage, and the microbes in it grew and flourished and evolved into people and stuff, and I have this book right here that proves it!" You'd write me off immediately as a complete whacko, regardless of how sincere I might appear or how deeply I believed what I was telling you. But
Just because an event described in the Bible cannot be explained by our current understanding of the universe does not mean it should be excluded from being a possibility.
Yes, it does
Frankly, I am disturbed by these ongoing attempts to corrupt and devalue science in order to proselytize. After thousands of years of stumbling around in the dark, Mankind finally figured out how to reliably distinguish what is, from what we might wish it to be. We never managed to unlock true power on any meaningful scale until science happened. You should be grateful for that, really, you should. Better yet, recognize that diluting science with religion is a fundamentally stupid mistake that will cost us dearly.
Anyone that feels threatened by greater understanding of Nature (God's creation, if you wish) should truly re-evaluate his or her own motives. They aren't pure, and are themselves deserving of greater scrutiny.
What fools these mortals be.
He's not a plagiarist ... he provided proper attribution.
On the other hand, he'd best watch out for Asimov's estate coming after him for theft^h^h^h^h^hcopyright infringement.
For those Star Trek fans wondering what to ask for this Christmas, you may wish to consider The Ultimate Star Trek Collection to be released on November 15. For just (cough) $2499.99
Well. I can ask.
but what is so unfriendly about the Windows XP install, in particular?
The ability to do these things is probably the strength of China. Because the economy is run by the government, it has the ability to pursue these large-scale and exciting projects such as sending a man to the moon or creating ecological cities.
... the United States would never be able to put a man on the Moon. Only totalitarian states like Russia and China can do things like that. And I'm still waiting for those nations to come up with an exciting, large-scale global networking system so that we can all communicate freely with each other.
You're right
The reality is that central planning doesn't work if you want to have an efficient, progressive economy that is responsive to the needs of the people. China's government wants the benefits of industrialization, and they want them badly. The problem is finding a balance between a free market and their traditional heavy-handed autocratic control. Put it this way: advanced large-scale industrialization and the requisite foreign investment are unlikely companions to totalitarianism. It remains to be seen if they can pull it off, long term, without their form of government undergoing some significant changes. To a degree, it depends upon how successful they are at providing economic benefits to their people. It's really, really hard to get someone to willingly go back to a rice paddy when they've had a taste of a better life. My own feeling is that China's government has opened a can of worms, big ones, and that they may find it impossible to recan them.
The advantage the Soviet Union had over the United States in terms of space exploration (a terribly expensive proposition) was the ability to maintain a particular effort over the long haul. In the United States, our space development programs are at the whim of the current Congress and Administration, making it difficult to achieve anything that requires sustained investment. So yes, in that respect China will have a similar advantage as long as its leaders are able to maintain their focus.
People that survive being in a fire often need treatment for smoke inhalation, but are released from the hospital after a short stay. People that smoke cigarettes may also require treatment for smoke inhalation, involving surgery, radiation and chemotherapy treatments, the loss of all body hair, and premature death.
... cigarette smoke is bad.
So yeah, I agree
Phooey on you. You might as well say that the Statue of Liberty has no meaning to us because the French designed and built it. As it happens, that particular construct was a powerful symbol of the respect that both nations maintained for each other, once upon a time (the American Revolution wouldn't have been successful without France's backing.) The original poster was correct: the attack was an attempt to demoralize us, and the Towers were chosen for their symbolic value. The fact that a Japanese architect designed them is ... well, meaningless in that context and I don't know why you brought it up, particularly since Japan is one of our allies.
Best polish up that resume. In this day and age it's highly unlikely that your company will get back on track. Find a more enlightened employer.
4. New hard drive technology from Western Digital powers itself from flywheel energy.
This guy's quakery works too, I am sure someone out there will give him money..
Hey. You got something against Quakers?
So who does God submit an ECO to, anyway?
is probably the best argument against this being a viable technology.
Impressive. Too bad they couldn't have run the effluent through a turbine and got a little power out of it.
Of course, we're all assuming that the Universe as we know it is a closed system. Perhaps it's not ... maybe some Intelligent Designer recharges the batteries now and then. Okay, I'll lay off the crack pipe for now.
There have been a number of books written about surviving the Big Bang. James Blish's Cities in Flight series ends with the protagonists competing with an evil Empire for the right to determine the course of the next cycle. Another excellent work is Poul Anderson's "Tau Zero", in which Earth's first ramscoop starship makes it past the Big Bang and establishes a civilization in the now-expanding Universe.
national securtity issue
... it will have to be big.
Frankly, I believe that if more countries made securing titty a national priority the world would be a happier place.
But the reality is this: whatever new technology for power production is introduced (unless it is so cheap and simple that it can be built in a garage and runs off tap water) will be owned (lock, stock and barrel), by the energy incumbents. They will spend any amount of money, buy all the laws (and lawmakers) necessary, in order to make sure it goes down that way. That means that as petroleum consumption drops due to increasing utilization of new power technology, the price per unit volume of petroleum products will be raised proportionately to maintain their profit stream. And when the last drop of petroleum is squeezed from the earth, their stockholders won't even notice.
Maybe it might have been different fifty or a hundred years ago, but given that corporatism is the rule of the day (and, more and more, the rule of Law) I can't see it happening any other way. Get used to paying BP Fusion and Citglow for your deuterium capsules. Certainly something will have to be discovered or invented before petroleum disappears completely, or civilization will disappear shortly thereafter.
Of course, when you get right down to it, petroleum is far, far too valuable a resource to be simply burned for power. We really need another power source capable of running a high-technology industrial civilization on a global scale. And whatever it is
"When a man cannot be pleased nobody tries."
And I certainly have no interest in pleasing Jeremy Rifkin or anyone like him. I thought once of buying him a pair of wooden clogs, like the ones a certain group of people used to throw into factory machinery.
It doesn't seem occur to people like this that an unlimited power source would open up the entire solar system for exploitation. Regardless, countries like China and India are "using up even more of the planet even faster" without such an energy source, so in the long run we'd be better off having it.
Maybe ... however that doesn't mean that the Universe isn't cyclic. For all we know, there have been trillions of Big Bangs, with an infinite number yet to go.
That's not true ... some make it out alive. But for some reason they never talk about the experience, and are often missing limbs and other body parts.
Could the Web Not be Invented Today?
If by "Web" the submitter means "World Wide Web" and if by "not be invented" he means "uninvented" then yes, it's entirely possible that the rest of the world will screw things up to the point that the Web will be effectively uninvented.
Besides, he got his Yoda-speak wrong, the title should have been "Invented not the Web could today be"